Jean Joohyun Oh

Feiyu Gavin Zhu, Jean Oh, Reid Simmons

Imitation learning has shown success in many tasks by learning from expert demonstrations. However, most existing work relies on large-scale demonstrations from technical professionals and close monitoring of the training process. These are challenging for a layperson when they want to teach the agent new skills. To lower the barrier of teaching AI agents, we propose Interactive Policy Restructuring and Training (InterPReT), which takes user instructions to continually update the policy structure and optimize its parameters to fit user demonstrations. This enables end-users to interactively give instructions and demonstrations, monitor the agent's performance, and review the agent's decision-making strategies. A user study (N=34) on teaching an AI agent to drive in a racing game confirms that our approach yields more robust policies without impairing system usability, compared to a generic imitation learning baseline, when a layperson is responsible for both giving demonstrations and determining when to stop. This shows that our method is more suitable for end-users without much technical background in machine learning to train a dependable policy

Aarati Andrea Noronha, Jean Oh

In this paper, we present a framework for enabling autonomous vehicles to interact with cyclists in a manner that balances safety and optimality. The approach integrates Hamilton-Jacobi reachability analysis with deep Q-learning to jointly address safety guarantees and time-efficient navigation. A value function is computed as the solution to a time-dependent Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman inequality, providing a quantitative measure of safety for each system state. This safety metric is incorporated as a structured reward signal within a reinforcement learning framework. The method further models the cyclist's latent response to the vehicle, allowing disturbance inputs to reflect human comfort and behavioral adaptation. The proposed framework is evaluated through simulation and comparison with human driving behavior and an existing state-of-the-art method.